Users may experience virtual three-dimensional (“3D”) spaces (e.g., based on virtual, real-world, or mixed reality scenes) for various reasons and in connection with various types of applications. For example, users may experience virtual 3D spaces for entertainment purposes, educational purposes, long-distance communication purposes, vicarious experience/travel purposes, or in connection with various other purposes and/or applications.
Virtual reality is one example of an application where users experience virtual 3D spaces. Virtual reality media content may be used to immerse users (i.e., viewers of the virtual reality media content) into interactive virtual reality worlds that users may experience by directing their attention to any of a variety of things being presented in the immersive virtual reality world at the same time. For example, at any time during the presentation of the virtual reality media content, a user experiencing the virtual reality media content may look around the immersive virtual reality world in any direction, giving the user a sense that he or she is actually present in and experiencing the immersive virtual reality world from a particular viewpoint or vantage point within the immersive virtual reality world.
In some examples, users may desire the flexibility of being able to experience a virtual 3D space (e.g., an immersive virtual reality world) from an arbitrary virtual vantage point within the virtual 3D space. In other words, the user may wish to move around to different locations within the virtual 3D space at will to experience the virtual 3D space (e.g., to view objects presented within the virtual 3D space, etc.) from arbitrary virtual vantage points anywhere within the virtual 3D space that the user may dynamically choose. To provide the user this freedom of movement to the different locations, conventional media player devices have typically received data representative of the virtual 3D space (e.g., 3D models of objects within the 3D space and the like) prior to the time when the user experiences the virtual 3D space. For example, a conventional media player device may download and store data (e.g., 3D models, textures, etc.) associated with a virtual 3D space on a local storage facility such as a hard drive of the media player device, or may access data associated with the virtual 3D space from a local physical medium accessible to the media player device (e.g., a physical disc). Unfortunately, however, more setup may be required by a user prior to experiencing such a virtual 3D space (e.g., setup associated with downloading, installing, loading into memory, etc., data content representative of the virtual 3D space), and it may be difficult for the virtual 3D space in such examples to reflect live or real-time updates to the content due to the requirement for much of the data to be received by the media player device prior to the user experience.
Moreover, even if all the data representative of the virtual 3D space were to be transmitted to a media player device in real time, data representing individual 3D models of objects included within the virtual 3D space may allow the virtual 3D space to be rendered from arbitrary virtual vantage points within the virtual 3D space, but may not be scalable to present larger virtual 3D spaces or virtual 3D spaces including more objects without sacrificing quality. For example, if the data being transmitted to the media player device represents individually renderable 3D models for each object included within the virtual 3D space, a significant amount of additional data (e.g., approximately twice as much data) may be needed to represent a virtual 3D space with, for example, ten objects, as compared to the amount of data needed to represent a virtual 3D space with, for example, five objects. Thus, even if data representative of a virtual 3D space including models of five objects can be transmitted to a media player device in real time, this type of transmission may not be able to scale to similarly represent ten objects or one hundred objects or more within the virtual 3D space.